Posts Tagged painting

This week’s finished project for #miniaturemonday is a Tsunami-class heavy cruiser or Firestorm Armada.

I’m quite pleased with how this turned out. I put more of the secondary colours onto this model in comparison to the standard cruisers and I think the effect is much more interesting. For this ship I added a red squadron marking as I envisage these ships being employed more aggressively than the ordinary cruisers. With luck I will finish the rest of the squadron in the next few weeks.

This week for Miniature Monday I have been able to paint up a Vanguard-class submarine for Dystopian Wars.

I used my standard black/gunmetal hull with red and white details and bronze for the pipes. I quite enjoyed painting the waterline base. It was done with Regal Blue, shaded with Asurman Blue wash, then highlighted with Enchanted Blue, Ice Blue and finally Skull White.

So far, I have one surfaced version and one submerged done. I also have more Britanian cruisers in progress as well as Aquan heavy cruisers for Firestorm Armada. Hopefully I will be able to show you them next week.

Another Miniature Monday has rolled round and I’m pleased to be able to report that on this occasion I have something to show you all.

This week’s completed project is the Britanian Majesty-class Dreadnought for Dystopian Wars:

Britanian Dreadnought

Painting this ship, I followed the same colour scheme I have been using for the other ships I have painted for this fleet. I’m quite happy with how the red and white trim contrasts with the black/gunmetal hull. I’m also quite pleased with how well the bronze I used to pick out the ram in the prow came out.

Majesty-class

Here is a picture of the Dreadnought with my Ruler-class Battleship, which I don’t think I’ve had the chance to show off on the blog either:

Majesty-class & Ruler-class

And in turn, the Battleship with the cruiser that was the first ship I painted up for the Britanians:

Ruler-class & Tribal-class

The next project for the Britanians will be to finish of the cruiser’s squadron mates. After that the time has probably come to look at the Frigates and Destroyers.

Some of you may have seen my recent post about my DIY Space Marine Chapter, the Brazen Angels.

Brazen Angel

As part of the brainstorming process to settle on that name and colour scheme, I experimented with lots of names and potential colours. For example, the second choice would have been the Crimson Avengers:

Crimson Avenger

For a while in fact, I was tempted to attempt a combined force mixing the stoic Brazen Angels, with their more mercurial Crimson Avengers.

At various points I’ve been considering other Space Marine armies, with a view to creating my own Codex chapter and/or a spiritual Space Wolves successor to complement my Brazen Angels. Some of my ideas are shown below.

Possible ‘spiritual’ successors to the Space Wolves I considered included the Storm Crows, Battle Dogs, War Drakes, and Frost Giants.

Storm Crow

The Storm Crow colour scheme was derived from an alternative Space Wolf colour scheme I once tried.

War Drake

I imagine that the War Drakes would have Salamander gene-seed but whose history would have led them to develop a Space Wolves style organisation.

Battle Dog

The name Battle Dog was inspired by the name of a Star Destroyer in an Aaron Allston Star Wars Novel.

Frost Giant

In contrast, possible Codex chapters I considered included the Rooks, the Comets, The Night Hawks, the Sky Lords and the Argent Marshals.

Argent Marshals

Other names I considered for this colour scheme included Steel Gauntlets, Iron Fists, Iron Wolves, Steel Wardens and Silver Stars.

Night Hawk

Sky Lord

Rook

The name ‘Rooks’ was actually thought us by a friend many years ago who no longer games. I took the name and tried to imagine a suitable colour scheme.

As some of you will have read in my previous posts, my big collecting/painting project for the first half of this year was the Brazen Angels, my DIY Blood Angels successor chapter for Warhammer 40,000.

The project is currently on hiatus as I have shifted my focus to collecting my fleets for Dystopian Wars and Firestorm Armada. However it was actually an extremely satisfying project and is actually the most successful collecting project I’ve worked on for Warhammer 40k in a good few years.

I must admit that what attarcted me to the Blood Angels list was their selection of shiny exclusive toys, in particular the Storm Raven gunship and the Baal Predator tank. I had previously been collecting Space Marine models to use as a Blood Ravens army using the standard Codex Space Marine rules. But seeing the options available to the Blood Angels list I quickly re-purposed those models.
I knew however that I wanted to do a successor chapter rather than the Blood Angels themselves as it would allow me to choose a colour scheme I liked and have some input to the iconography I used. Also, after years of eschewing ‘home brew’ chapter creation I suddenly felt motivated to invent something of my own.

The Original Brazen Angels Test Model

The original Brazen Angel was one of a half dozen or so test models I painted up to try out different colour ideas. Not all of them were particularly well thought through, but a couple I was quite pleased with. I’ve always liked the idea of bronze painted Space Marines so this was a good opportunity to test what it would look like. The black and red shoulder pads were chosen because they contrasted well with the bronze, but the red chest eagle was intending to be a deliberate reference to the red of the Blood Angels.

Once I had decided that I wanted to take the colour scheme forward, I spent a lot of time trying to think of a good name for the chapter. A lot of the time this took was due to an initial determination to crowbar the word ‘praetorian’ into the name. I wanted to avoid the use of ‘blood’ in the name too, as I thought that was a bit too obvious and unoriginal in a Blood Angels successor.

In the end I chose ‘Brazen Angels’, which I actually really liked, and had the virtue of being simple and still referencing the parent chapter, but not in the obvious way.

The colour scheme was originally Tin Bitz, highlighted with Dwarf Bronze and Shining Gold. However, expediency and/or laziness led to be changing it to Humbrol bronze spray paint, shaded with Devlen Mud and then highlighted with Shining Gold.

Tactical Marine

I must admit that so far, the army lacks much in the way of Blood Angels-esque decoration, or signature items such as the Infernus Pistol. This is largely because most of them were originally assembled as a Codex army. Over time though, I might be able to remedy this.

Tactical Marine

Like all projects, the ideas had to develop as work went on. After painting up three tactical squads it was time to paint up my assault squad. This forced me to consider whether to introduce the traditional yellow markings of assault squads into the design. After due consideration, the red shoulder pad of the models painted so far was retroactively designated a ‘tactical’ marking and the assault squad instead were painted with shoulder pads in assault yellow, but retaining the all important red chest eagle. When I paint up my devastator squad they will have blue shoulders.

Assault Sergeant

Assault Marine

My original plan for the army was to make use of the fact that the Blood Angels list allowed Land Raiders to be taken as dedicated transports to design an= 3000 point armoured heavy assault force based around tactical squads in Land Raiders supported by a Baal Predator and Predator Annihilator as well as another squad in a Storm Raven with mobile backup coming from a deep striking assault squad and some Land Speeder Tornadoes.

Predator Tank

Since that original plan however, I came to the decision to step back from Games Workshop games and products owing to their ever rising prices and my feeling that I was getting less and less value for money. As result I have scaled back my plan to a more modest 2000 point force. I will be making the last two purchases necessary to complete this force soon, and as things stand, they may be my last purchases from GW for some time.

Nevertheless, I’m pleased with the army I’ve designed and very happy to have actually more or less completed a 40k army for the first time in quite a few years. Once everything is assembled and painted I hope I will be able to take the army for a spin or two on the gaming table. I think building an army of my own invention really helped motivate me to get the army properly collected and painted and I think made it a more treasured possession than some I’ve had in the past. Certainly I wasn’t tempted to sell my models off like I was with other GW odds and ends I’ve got lying around.

Hopefully I will be able to update another time with some more painted models, maybe even the Storm Raven

Yesterday, I blogged about my recent endeavours with Dystopian Wars by Spartan Games. Today I’ll be talking about my parallel adventures with another of Spartan’s games, Firestorm Armada.

Firestorm Armada is the game that made we want to try Spartan Game’s products. This was quite a big deal considering I had never before considered doing any game that wasn’t produced by Games Workshop.

I’m a huge sci-fi fan (as you may have inferred). I like spaceships of all descriptions and the opportunity to paint up some cool spaceship models was too good to miss. Of course there are other spaceship games, most obviously GW’s Battlefleet Gothic but FA has the advantage of being very strongly supported by Spartan in contrast to BFG having long been exiled to the wilderness of the ‘Specialist Games’ range.

I ummed and ahhed about what fleet to collect. For a long time I was thinking of collecting the Sorylians. I liked their chunky but sleek, linear designs and their sense of being heavily armed. Once I started to get an idea of the different capabilities of the various fleets, I was turned off by the last of forwrad guns on the Sorylian ships. This is purely a personal preference, but I didn’t fancy being so dependent on broadside weapons.

This lead me to the Aquans. I liked the ships having weaponry all round and thought that being able to manoeuvre to make use of several relatively weaker weapons batteries would be an interesting challenge. The Aquan ships also had a very distinctive look which reminded me of the iconic Mon Calamari star cruisers from the Star Wars trilogy.

I now have nearly 1000 points of Aquan ships and I’m eagerly awaiting the preview of the Aquan dreadnought which should go up on the Spartan Games website any day now.

When I came to painting them, I decided I wanted to incorporate several colours into the scheme to prevent the finished product being too dull. The Aquan designs don’t have much technical ‘kibble’ to break up the hull colour the way a lot of other fleets do. In the end I settled on a primary hull colour of Codex Grey, with portions of the hull picked out in Shadow Grey and Ice Blue.

Poseidon-class Battleship

Manta-class Battle Carrier

Storm-class Cruisers

I’m not sure what I will add to the fleet. It will depend what Spartan release, though I have been thinking of adding some Terran allies and maybe some Terquai when they become available. I quite like the idea of adding a Terran Razorthorn-class battleship painted red as a tribute to the Errant Venture from the Star Wars: X-wing novels.

Hope you like the pictures. And remember, concentrate all firepower on the Super Star Destroyer.